Week 7 Info: Joins and Databases
Hello Class,
Today is the start of week 7, where we will learn how to work with data that is stored in multiple different different sources. We will study the join function and learn about primary and foreign keys, as well as simple and compound or composite keys. The discussion of keys and joins will lead in to an introduction to relational databases, which are one of the most common ways for large organizations to store data. We will talk about the trade-offs of using databases versus other data storage schemes and introduce SQL (the most common standard for languages that access and modify databases) through R packages DBI and dbplyr and duckdb, which is a relational database system designed for data analysis and portability and which is also easy to learn from. In the first weeks of this program we have discussed how R and python are two required languages for data scientists to have proficiency in. SQL and databases are equally important.
You will have a lab assignment titled R and SQL due next Sunday at midnight.
For your reading assignments and more details about this week, head over to Module 7.